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Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

AUTHOR: Kretzschmar, William A.TITLE: The Linguistics of SpeechPUBLISHER: Cambridge University PressYEAR: 2009

Wendy Anderson, Department of English Language, University of Glasgow, UK

SUMMARYThis book makes a convincing call for a focus on the linguistics of speech (i.e.parole in Saussurean terms). Kretzschmar explains that this is not a matter ofceasing to pay attention to linguistic structure (i.e. langue), but ofredressing the balance between the two. The book provides compelling evidence,largely drawn from linguistic survey research and from corpus linguistics, thatresearch methods today are easily up to the task of coping with sufficientquantities of parole for a sturdy analysis. This is therefore a plea to look tothe linguistics of speech to investigate the relationship between speech andstructure, to reconsider problematic areas in linguistic structure with inputfrom speech, and to tackle real-life linguistic problems such as those stemmingfrom contrasting attitudes to language.

The book's eight chapters take the reader through the argument and evidence in alogical manner. Chapter 1, 'The contemporary marketplace of ideas aboutlanguage' introduces the distinction between 'rightness' and 'correctness' inlanguage as a means of highlighting the often destructive differences betweentypical academic and popular perspectives on language. ‘Correctness’ relates toinstitutionalised forms of language, such as Standard English, while 'rightness'is a relative notion, concerned with the appropriateness of usage in particulargroups (whether defined geographically, socially or diachronically). This isexemplified by the Oakland Ebonics controversy in the late 1990s, in whichacademic and popular ideas about language stood in stark contrast to oneanother. Kretzschmar returns to this debate in the final chapter, noting thatwhile perspectives from the linguistics of speech cannot resolve such issues,they do “address the contradictions of those public and academic debates” (p. 271).

Chapter 2 offers a summary of Saussurean ideas about language, focusing,naturally, on the distinction between parole and langue. It is well known todaythat Saussure identified langue as the primary object of linguistics, withparole as a subordinate variable (e.g. Saussure 1916 (1986), cited here p. 42).Sometimes overlooked, however, is the fact that he “not only admitted thepossibility of an alternative linguistics of speech, he went a long way towardsdefining it” (p. 46). Methods for dealing with speech were simply not availableto him in the early twentieth century. It is Kretzschmar’s fundamental claim inthis book, however, that we are now in a position to plug this considerable gap:in his words, “What was intractable for Saussure has become conceivable for ustoday” (pp. 99-100).

The next three chapters set out evidence for a linguistics of speech. Chapters 3and 4 focus on the evidence from linguistic surveys, particularly the LinguisticAtlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS), part of the LinguisticAtlas Project. It emerges that despite the massive amounts of variation in thedata, it shows the same pattern of distribution, namely the ‘A-curve’(asymptotic hyperbolic curve), which Kretzschmar explains is not just a curiousproperty of speech but of great importance for the theory he is proposing (p.99). Chapter 4 offers an overview of the statistical measures needed tointerpret such data, applying these to the LAMSAS data to allow the reader tounderstand the nature of the distribution of variants at all linguistic levels.Both chapters include numerous figures, which helpfully illustrate subtle butsignificant differences in analyses.

Chapter 5 shows the place of findings from corpus linguistics in the emerginglinguistics of speech. It is particularly good to see corpus and dialectologicalmethods brought together as part of a more encompassing theoretical model, giventhat the connections are evident but rarely emphasised. This is a model whichmarries the textual with the social, and as such can only help the explanatorypower of both approaches. Kretzschmar sets out the methods of Firthianlinguistics and Neo-Firthian corpus linguistics, grounded in the fundamentalassumption that meaning is use, and demonstrates how the behaviour of variantsis similar regardless of the dimension in which they are considered (e.g.distribution of sounds in geographical space as revealed by survey data,distribution of words in text types as revealed in corpora). Again, there isample evidence from corpora.

Chapter 6 works through the claim that the linguistics of speech is a complexsystem, in the mathematical sense, because the evidence already presented fromsurveys and corpora displays all of the characteristics of complex systems,including openness, non-equilibrium, emergent order, and the property ofscaling. Kretzschmar notes that the model of a complex system has been suggestedfor language, citing work by Schneider (1997) and especially Bybee (e.g. 2001)among others, but claims that even the most extensive of such work “remains anunderstanding by analogy, not by identity.” (p. 184). In moving from thelinguistics of structure to the linguistics of speech, and drawing once more ona wealth of evidence, here Kretzschmar takes this further step, arguing that inspeech we can identify all of the characteristics of complex adaptive systems,and indeed rule out the possibility that it is a chaotic system. Assuming weaccept this evidence, then we can access the advantages of being able to drawinsight from other sciences which involve complex systems.

Serving as a complement to Chapters 3 and 4's aggregated data from surveys andcorpora, Chapter 7, ‘Speech perception’, introduces the psychology and thephysiology of the individual into the theory. The discussion here encompassesareas such as perceptual dialectology, cognitive linguistics, prototype theoryand schemas, and spatial perception. The scaling properties of speech emerge assignificant, and support the model of the linguistics of speech as a complexsystem.

Chapter 8, finally, serves as a summary and conclusion, and a restatement of theplea to take the linguistics of speech more seriously now that we have the meansto cope with it in sufficient quantities. The proposed model is set out in termsof a formal conceptual model and also in discursive terms. This is then relatedto the linguistics of linguistic structure, and areas for future research andapplication are outlined in some detail. The potential benefits for historicallinguistics are particularly tantalising: statistical analysis of historicaldata becomes a more viable avenue once we know to expect certain patterns ofvariation.

EVALUATIONThis is an exciting, sometimes dizzying, book, which incorporates ideas fromareas rarely brought together, such as chaos theory, linguistic surveys, corpuslinguistics, perceptual dialectology, social attitudes to language, andstatistics. The exposition of speech as a complex system, with emergent order,non-linear distribution, and the property of scaling, is intensely exciting. Oneof its most satisfying contributions is the reminder that while the variabilityof language often appears uncontrolled and uncontrollable, an analysis from theperspective of a different scale may allow overarching structural patterns topop into view. This is reminiscent of the suggestion by Beedham (2005) thatunexplained exceptions to rules are artefacts of a faulty analysis. Beedham andKretzschmar differ, however, in their proposed solutions: for Beedham, thesolution lies in alternative analyses of the evidence (the ‘method of lexicalexceptions’), while for Kretzschmar, it lies in being guided in the analysis ofhuge quantities of data by appropriate models from mathematics and statistics.

Various sections of the book deal with complex ideas from fields, particularlyin mathematics, with which many linguists will have only a passing familiarity,and of which only few will have a professional working knowledge. Yet thediscussion is very well-pitched, moving smoothly from basic concepts toapplications, and so the pertinence of such ideas and models for languagebecomes starkly clear. Many groups of readers will find something to take fromthis book: it offers a coherent big picture, but one in which even the smallestpieces of data are visible.

Saussure, F. de (1916/1986). Course in General Linguistics. Chicago: Open Court.

Schneider, E. (1997). Chaos Theory as a Model for Dialect Variability andChange? In A. Thomas, ed., Issues and Methods in Dialectology. Bangor:University of North Wales, 122-36.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Wendy Anderson is Lecturer in the Department of English Language,
University of Glasgow, Scotland. Her teaching and research interests
include: semantics, corpus linguistics, English, Scots and French, and
translation. Between 2004 and 2008, she was Research Assistant for the
Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS), and Corpus of Modern Scottish
Writing projects, at the University of Glasgow. Recently, with John
Corbett, also University of Glasgow, she published “Exploring English with
Online Corpora” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).